Chapter 555 The Innovation Program

Chapter 555 The Innovation Program

Thanks to Hephaestus Heavy Industries opening the floodgates, more than a million new companies were registered in a very brief time. And following that, millions of patents for space-related equipment, ranging from cups and other dishes that were designed to incorporate gravity plating to ensure they didn’t spill during heavy maneuvers all the way to prospective capacitor banks and engines.

It wasn’t that the empire had released their technology to the public domain, but rather that people were allowed to incorporate the tech in their design as a kind of “black box” piece that they could license from the empire. The only requirement was that, if a design incorporated publicly known empire technology, the resulting object could only be manufactured by HHI. That was in the licensing agreement, and no negotiation on that clause would be accepted at all.

The empire, meanwhile, did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of the crowdsourced innovations. Quite a few things, in fact, had surprised both Aron and Felix with the thought processes behind them. Oddly enough, the dishes were what surprised them the most.

“I can’t believe we didn’t think of that,” Aron moaned, leaning back in his chair and covering his face with his palms.

Rina looked at him and snorted a soft giggle, then covered her mouth and looked shocked at the weird noise that had just come out of her mouth.

“We aren’t gods, so of course we’re gonna miss some things here and there,” Felix said, chagrined. “I can only wonder what else we forgot.”

Aron sat up straight and consciously cleared his expression. “We need to heavily reward the people who succeeded. There’s a lot of designs out there that aren’t very feasible, quite a few that barely meet the baseline in terms of performance, and a few that exceed them. But the people who think of things that we should’ve thought of and didn’t...” he sighed.

“How should we reward them?”

......

Two weeks later, in Park Seo-Yeon’s living room.

The five partners behind Imugi-Danche were having a planning meeting when their phones all lit up and sounded a unique alert tone, indicating a message had been received from an imperial official. They all pulled out their phones and unlocked them, then a holographic display automatically lit up with a push notification from the imperial space agency.

[Congratulations, Imuge-Danche, on your design, patent 197-0002-813604-XT588V2-TEP pending, for being accepted into the Innovation Program. A representative will contact you within the next 48 hours with further details. Please follow this +link+ for more information on your rights and responsibilities as a company in the Innovation Program.

[Welcome to the team, Imugi-Danche!]

All five of the people in the room froze as they read the email on their holographic display screens, their mouths open so wide they could swallow a chicken’s egg without breaking the shell.

Then the shouting began a full three minutes later after they all came out of their collective stare state and leapt at each other, jumping up and down in a jubilant group hug. They had done it!

“This calls for a celebration!” Kim Ye-Jin shouted, and went to the kitchen. He soon came back with a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne.

He popped the cork and champagne foam covered the five celebrating friends, who didn’t care in the least about the mess and poured each other a glass.

“To the innovation program and the empire!” Park Seo-Yeon shouted as he raised his champagne flute. “And to the emperor, long may he reign!”